RECONCEPTUALIZING DEVELOPMENT JOURNALISM: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF FOUR AFRICAN NATIONS (TANZANIA, NIGERIA, SIERRA LEONE, KENYA)

The purpose of this dissertation was to systematically examine African newspaper content as a series of problematic situations in order to formulate a theory of news as discrepancy.;This study shifted conceptual focus from decisional orientations to development journalism as problematic situations, in order to examine, within a comparative context, the essence and variety of development issues addressed by different African newspapers.;The conceptual framework of the dissertation was derived from (a) Edelstein's problematic situation model which classified and explicated problematic situations in terms of needs, losses, indeterminacies, conflicts, blocking, steps toward solution, and consequences of actions; and (b) Carter's affective relations model which suggested discriminating attributes of objects, issues, and events.;Our hypothesis was that given the consistency of the problematic model, problematic situations addressed by the four African newspapers would vary according to changing political structures, levels of economic well-being, and existing cultural traditions.;A review of the literature showed that past research approached development journalism from decisional and pragmatic perspectives: decisional in the sense that the mass media presented decisional choices to the public without regard to the nature of the problem; pragmatic in the sense that development journalism served a legitimizing function for coercive and fragile governments.;The method employed was a content analysis of newspaper editorials, letters to the editor, essays, and development news and features of the four African newspapers: The Daily News (Tanzania), The Daily Mail (Sierra Leone), The Daily Nation (Kenya), and The Daily Times (Nigeria) in 1963, 1976, and 1981.;Some of the findings of this investigation included (a) newspapers in countries with politically repressive regimes focused more on problematic situations dealing with past conditions (losses), societal needs, and steps to solution; (b) countries with fairly well-developed economies and a greater level of political stability emphasized a variety of problematic situations but specifically steps to solution, conflict and societal needs.;We concluded that news in the African context is perceived as a product of culture and therefore integrally operative within those cultural guidelines.